680/So I Found This Book

So I Found This Book
Date of Scene:	30 October 2023
Location:	Tsukino-Osaka Dorm
Synopsis:	Mamoru finds Nephrite's journal and brings it to Naru for help deciphering.
Cast of Characters:	Mamoru Chiba, Naru Osaka
Tinyplot:	Midnight Tokyo

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Mamoru Chiba has posed:
    Darien TXT: so i found a book neph wrote
    Darien TXT: by which i mean im going nuts bc i dont have time to like
    Darien TXT: decipher the thing
    Darien TXT: there is *so much math* and normally yay math
    Darien TXT: but not when im trying to read a diary lol

Naru Osaka has posed:
Naru TXT: ... ...
Naru TXT: Why is it full of math?
Naru TXT: Like spell math? Code math? Homework math?
Naru TXT: is it a diary? Should you be reading his diary?
Naru TXT: How do you have Neph's diary?

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
    Darien TXT: because it's in code because he's neph
    Darien TXT: it might not be a diary but
    Darien TXT: it's handwritten and looks like a diary
    Darien TXT: idk it was in my box of my parents stuff

Naru Osaka has posed:
Naru TXT: I didn't realize you had stuff from your parents. That's cool.
Naru TXT: I'm picturing Neph's handwriting being really neat and compact.
Naru TXT: Do you need help deciphering? Should we decipher it? Is that cool if its a diary?
Naru TXT: How old of a diary?

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
    Darien TXT: i definitely need help deciphering. i mean ive got the key
    Darien TXT: its in the book
    Darien TXT: and it WAS in my parents stuff that nobody but me should be in
    Darien TXT: which sounds like an invitation to read it
    Darien TXT: not that old? i mean theres no date or anything but

Naru Osaka has posed:
Naru TXT: Okay, putting the key in it basically BEGS to be deciphered.
Naru TXT: Yeah. That sounds like it was put there to be read.
Naru TXT: We can apologize later if we have to?
Naru TXT: I'm kinda wondering if it's pre-Obsidian or post.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
    Darien TXT: no way of knowing until we read it :D
    Darien TXT: can i come over with it or?

Naru Osaka has posed:
Naru TXT: C'mon over. I'll put the kettle on. This will require coffee.

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
When Mamoru shows up at Naru's door with book in hand, the jumpy excited trepidation could only be Mamoru's, not Darien's. When she lets him in, he holds it up: green cover, a marking on it that probably means something to Mamoru. "I texted Kazuo too, by the way. I told him where I was taking it so if he's free he might stop by, I don't know."

Naru Osaka has posed:
The door was cracked open in invitation to Mamoru's arrival and Naru is over making coffee. One coffee at least, and a second hot beverage if desired.

"The more eyes the better if we're working out cyphers." Naru agrees. She's cleared off space on her desk and dragged Usagi's desk chair over there, clearly expecting to both be working on it together. "So is it feasible to each take a chunk? Or is it complicated enough that it's going to take both of us on each section. Any sections that leap out at you as something you want to read first, or just in order here?"

The smell of hot coffee wafts over the conversation, promising to add more attentiveness to the confab, or at least more wakefulness. "When we want a break, I made muffins. Cranberry lemon."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Coffeeeee," Mamoru zombies affably, then puts the book down on the desk, "and cranberry lemon? You're really going all out, that sounds amazing."

He deposits himself in Usagi's desk chair and opens the book. "I can't tell what the sections even are, so we should probably start from the beginning, and there's enough math involved that it'll take both of us and a couple of scientific calculators to do each word."

He takes out his personal phone. "Fortunately, scientific calculator right here."

Naru Osaka has posed:
"Muffins were because I was procrastinating." Naru points out. "You just happen to be visiting before your best beloved can inhale them all." She flashes a smile.

"Yeah, I figured we might be just working blind if it's in code." Naru works on getting two coffees together to bring to the desk. "I figure between phones, laptop.. even if its but a mundane laptop.. and an honest to goodness vintage scientific calculator, we are about to do even more mystical math homework."

She carries two mugs over, having spent enough time with Mamoru not to ask how he takes his coffee. "Hopefully it's not any more complicated than the last mystical math homework I was working on."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"You're some kind of angel of mercy," Mamoru says as he takes the cup reverently and extremely carefully sips. He does not burn his mouth. What he does do is set it down afterwards and hold the book open to the cipher, then turn it so Naru can see it head on.

The next page is written in code.

The words aren't written top to bottom.

It's a code that should look awfully familiar to Naru, as she's had access for months to an annotated map of Tokyo with those same glyphs, those same constellations and permutations on it...

"This isn't all astronomy," he says, "it's also astrological, because that's how Neph rolls."

Naru Osaka has posed:
"Just an addict." Naru snickers as she settles into her chair tucking her legs up under her. How she manages to be comfortable while effectively folding her petite self into some sort of human origami at her desk is a mystery to the ages, but there she is.

Naru hunhs softly as she looks over the page and reaches out to flip a couple pages ahead and then back to the cypher page and the first page of code. "Astronomy, and astrological.. because of course it is." Naru uncurls enough to grab her phone. "Okay I am going to print us each out a copy of the cypher code so that we dont have to keep flipping back to it." Possibly for other map like reasons too. "Make sense?"

"I am pretty sure that if we could submit half of what we do for magic as an independant study, we'd get amazing grades. But noooo.."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"Makes sense," agrees Mamoru cheerfully, with absolutely no idea what he's actually agreeing to. "And right? You should be able to get a Ph.D. in magic! Eventually!" He then picks up his coffee and turns his phone back to its calculator function, then sips as he starts thumbing in calculus while looking at the very first constellation.

Naru Osaka has posed:
And so they get going. With print outs of the cypher for both of them, and each working on the same word. Just one word. One. Single. Word.

There's debate. There's discussion. There's an impromptu calculus lesson. And then another chunk of time googling astrological calcuations. After an hour there's a break to stretch, and refresh coffee.

After two hours there's a longer break for muffins, because brains need food and two hours solid is enough to make anyone's brain dribble a little out one's ears. Even if the puzzles are still getting turned over in one's head while not actively being worked on.

That break provides an ah moment. Not a solution, but the way in which they had made a wrong assumption earlier in the process. At least it's easier to do it again?

It's ages before Naru stretches and nudges a much erased and re-written piece of paper over towards Mamoru. "Okay.. I can't find where I screwed it up this time. I got a solution, and it LOOKS right, but I just get nonsense. Your turn to fix it."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
Mamoru glances from his paper to Naru's, first starting to compare the calculations to his own, and then he does a doubletake. And he erases one symbol from his paper and substitutes one in from Naru's paper before he starts to explain:

"You didn't get it wrong, that's-- no, I'm losing it, dammit, one second."

He grabs a piece of paper from the pile of scrap, eyeballs it, flips out a tiny pen knife from sleight-of-hand-land, cuts out a square, slaps the paper down on top of Naru's, and stares at the solution on its own.

He puts his hands over his ears. He closes his eyes. He looks at the word again, and then what comes out of his mouth is two syllables in something that sounds forested and deep and secretly bright.

He looks enormously pleased with himself. And then baffled. "I-- maybe it's a language from a jillion years ago that goes along with stuff I don't remember? I'm getting homework and court intrigue vibes from it."

A beat. He looks at Naru. "That word is, conceptually, 'origin'. There are other potential translations of it but I'm getting a headache thinking about it on top of going through this for every single word."

Naru Osaka has posed:
"I mean.. the next one should be faster?" Naru offers on the topic of how long that one word took.

Which is to say just hours, rather than hours and hours. The computations are many and finicky, and doing it by hand is tedious at best.

Naru leans in to look at that single word in a language that there is no amount of time in language arts nor with fussy animated owls that would let her learn it. She looks over to Mamoru as he struggles with it and considers before she nods. "So not only do we need to crack the code, but then we need to translate it." She takes a slow breath in and then lets it out in a sigh. "Okay."

As to what's okay, that is a good question. Naru does continue. "How private do you want this to be, or can we farm out some of this cypher busting? Cause we can literally do it word by word, but you won't be reading it for a year or two. Unless we can figure out how to automate it at all."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"I-- I don't know," says Mamoru after a second of looking poleaxed. Because Naru has an excellent point. "I don't know if I trust anyone with the contents of this book. I mean, I don't know what's actually in it, you know? I trust *you* but you can't make a language database out of it to translate after it's deciphered, and I think you'd respect it if I only read you parts of it... what if it's just for me?"

Naru Osaka has posed:
"Right. You can read as much or as little as you want to me." Naru gives a little shrug. "It is, I suspect, mostly between the pair of you and your history together. No amount of crush gives me any sort of right to impinge on that."

Naru flickers a half smile, full of complicated emotions. "Besides, depending on the minute and how active the demon is, he might yet try and kill me at some point." Because that's the basis of a good solid healthy relationship, right there.

"So then if this is staying super private, then we each keep a copy of the proof that gives us the how of decypering, and we get to this particular decyphering bit by bit in our copious spare time and it just takes as long as it takes. You have the advantage of being able to check your own work, but I'll just give you however far I get periodically and we'll very slowly stitch it together."

Naru notes thoughtfully. "The calculations we can probably feed into someone's device, but only if we trust that they don't know the language and have one layer of privacy left intact."

Mamoru Chiba has posed:
"That would be-- I mean, they would be scanning the book and could maybe eventually translate the language from that, even if it's not the whole thing, even if it's just limited... I'd have to trust that it would be that limited. I doubt it's related to any language in the written history of Earth, though, so maybe it... maybe. I guess. Do you know any device users that'd be that trustworthy? I mean, it's an enemy notebook in an enemy code in an enemy language, in the holding of an enemy who can speak that language..."

Mamoru trails off, then sits back and scrubs his face with the heels of his hands. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I know I'm not-- I have no grounds to stand on."

Naru Osaka has posed:
"I mean.. the first two that come to mind are Chrono or Rashmi." Naru says after a moment. "The first we already need to talk to about contracts, so he's willing to help that far, and the second.. well.. she's smart. I just don't know how she'd feel about it all."

Naru looks rueful. "Mercury feels like there's too much potential for understanding the language, but perhaps that's as much a risk with Chrono too."

A moment later and then Naru stretches again. "And if you prefer we do it the slow way, so that it's super secure.. then we do it the slow way. I promise you that I can't read it without you."

No Device. No Magic. No reincarnation. No Powers. Just a lot of math and attention to detail. It's not pretty, but it can be done.